


broken, as you clutch the sleeve of my jacket and beg me not to leave

by respoftw



Series: 35 Ways To Say I Love You In The Pegasus Galaxy [26]
Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Episode: s05e06 The Shrine, M/M, Rodney POV
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-25
Updated: 2016-10-25
Packaged: 2018-08-24 16:24:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,113
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8379238
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/respoftw/pseuds/respoftw
Summary: Rodney forces himself to watch the tapes a week after he’s discharged from the infirmary.He picks one at random and spends the next twenty minutes throwing up in his toilet.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Of course this had to be a Shrine tag - the title practically begs for it!

Rodney forces himself to watch the tapes a week after he’s discharged from the infirmary.

He picks one at random and spends the next twenty minutes throwing up in his toilet.  

It takes him another month before he works up the courage to try it again.

He starts near the beginning, thinking it will be easier.  After all, he still has memories of the early stages, it can’t be that bad.

It is.  It’s so much worse than he remembers.

He understands now; why the people he passes in the corridors can’t meet his eyes (why  _ John  _ can’t meet his eyes.)  

When he sees the man he barely recognises as himself tell Keller that he loves her, he laughs.  He laughs so hard that he ends up bent over his toilet again.

Jennifer seems disappointed when he tells her the next morning that it’s not true.  For one brief second he wants to shake her and scream at her arrogance.  If it had been up to her, he would have died.  He would have died in the most humiliating way he can imagine and all for what?  The words of a man who had lost half his mind?  He thinks he’ll always hate her a little bit for that.

It’s not fair to her but life isn’t fair, it’s just fairer than death.  She doesn’t smile when he says that.  

John would have got it.

John isn’t speaking to him anymore.

Rodney doesn’t blame him for that.  He’s saw how often John sat in on those inane videos, the tell tale sign of a black wristband just out of shot; the calming drawl not quite picked up by the microphone when the stranger that’s wearing Rodney’s face gets too agitated for Keller to manage; the way the other Rodney's gaze keeps drifting off in one direction.

When John isn’t there, it’s somehow worse.  He watches himself yell out for John,  _ scream _ for John, beg for John to come back and he hates himself.

He doesn’t stop watching.  He can’t.  It’s like the ultimate in car crash TV.  

He watches himself say goodbye.

It doesn’t make sense to him that Jennifer kept these videos up for so long, well beyond the point that she could be gaining any useful data.  He hacks into his medical file and destroys the originals.

He systematically wipes every trace of the videos from the system, including his own copies as he watches each one.

Jennifer rats him out to Woolsey. 

Her outrage when Woolsey barely blinks over the so-called invasion of confidential patient records makes Rodney laugh.  

Woolsey claps him on the shoulder as Keller storms out and Rodney is grateful.  Even if it does mean everyone knows what he’s doing now.

He only has one file left to watch.

He plans to get extremely drunk after he’s finished, has saved one of the whisky bottles that he’d taken from Carson’s room for that very purpose.

He watches Jennifer try and guide him through the usual words and wishes he’d started drinking already.  The Rodney on screen is wearing the leather jacket that he doesn’t know how he got.  He knows that this must be the last day, the day that they visited the shrine and his anger flares again at the uselessness of it all.

The camera is left running after she’s given up until all that’s left on the screen is the other Rodney, sitting quietly on an infirmary bed, humming to himself and occasionally stroking the leather sleeve of his jacket.

He watches it all, four minutes total of him sitting doing nothing, determined to make it through to the bitter end when he can destroy this one last file and then get blindingly drunk.

A bitter celebration.

Four minutes and three seconds in, John appears.  Rodney can tell the moment he walks in, even before he appears on screen, because of the way the face on the screen breaks out into a wide smile.

_ God, he wants a drink. _

The John on the screen sits next to the Rodney on the infirmary bed.  He tries to talk, to explain where they’re going but quickly comes to the realisation that Rodney isn’t comprehending.  

Rodney watches with wet eyes as John hunches over and breathes heavily, his shoulders shaking with feeling.  He watches himself reach over and start to stroke John’s hair, crooning nonsense words of comfort while John’s shoulders shake harder.

For the first time since he began watching these, Rodney feels like he shouldn’t be, that he doesn’t have the right.  He shouldn’t be seeing this, it doesn’t matter that he’s already lived through it, he doesn’t remember this and he’s not sure that he wants to now.

The John on the screen is crying, huge racking sobs catching in his throat and all the stupid, idiotic Rodney on the screen can do is stroke his hair and pat his head and -  _ god _ , Rodney wants to break something.

John shifts suddenly on the bed, grabbing onto the sleeve of that mysterious leather jacket  and begs.  He begs Rodney to come back, to  _ them _ ,  _ to him _ .  He pleads with Rodney not to leave him, to stay, and the other Rodney looks so confused, so scared that it just makes John break into even more pieces.

“I love you.”

He watches John say it, watches the way his mouth moves around the words and hears the way his voice breaks in the middle and Rodney shuts the video down, deletes the entire thing and makes sure no trace that it ever existed could ever be found.

He’s breathing heavily by the time he’s done, like he’s just ran 5k in full TAC gear and it feels that way too.

The sound of the door to his quarters sliding open is almost expected.  He knows who it is without looking.  There’s only one person that Atlantis rolls over like that for.

“Did you mean it?” he asks without looking.

The answer is a long time coming, so long that Rodney starts to think that John had left or that he had never been there at all.  

He feels John’s bulk settle on the bed next to him, feels John’s hand reach out and grab onto the sleeve of the leather jacket that Rodney has worn every day since his discharge, clutching at it like a security blanket and Rodney knows there and then that the jacket is John’s.  Of course it is.

“I’m keeping the jacket,” he says.

John huffs a laugh.  It makes Rodney smile.  He doesn’t remember the last time he heard John laugh.  Rodney reaches for John’s hand and squeezes.  

“I love you too.”   
  


**Author's Note:**

> As always, you can find me on [Tumblr](http://buffycuddlespigs.tumblr.com)


End file.
